A quick story about the Christmas carol ‘Silent Night’

This past year, the wife and I were in Salzburg, Austria, for a couple of days. We went there while we were making our way through Germany.

One thing I learned while we were there was the historical background of the Christmas carol “Silent Night.” You know the words, it’s that Christmas carol that romanticizes the night of Jesus’ birth.

Silent Night was composed in 1818 by Franz Gruber, in a small town 11 miles north of Salzburg, although the lyrics were written in 1816. That’s a critical year in Austrian history for two reasons:

First, the Napoleonic Wars had completed raging through Europe only the year before, ending in 1815.

Napoleon had marched through Europe multiple times, and Salzburg had switched sides four times between competing armies. Each time it did, the invading army ransacked parts of it, and deported many national treasures out of the city. Relics were taken back to other cities like Paris and Munich. It is only recently over the past 50 years the Austrian government had been able to recollect some of them and put them on display.

No doubt about it, Salzburg took a pounding during those wars. When your city gets beaten up as much as Salzburg, it can demoralize the residents.

Second, environmental pressures yielded a bad set of crops that year.

1816 is known as the Year Without a Summer because of severe climate abnormalities that caused average global temperatures to decrease by 0.4–0.7 °C (0.7–1.3 °F). This resulted in major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere.

The root cause was a volcanic eruption of Mt Tambora in the Dutch East Indies. The resultant cool temperatures and heavy rains caused failures of wheat, oats, and potato harvests all around Europe. This led to food shortages and famines, and the BBC estimates that it led to 200,000 deaths in Europe.

So it’s these two factors combined – a ransacked city and famine around the land – that is the background for the song.

You might think a carol would be composed that reflects the turmoil of the time, and it does… but you have to look really hard. Rather than decrying the circumstances of the time period, Silent Night says “Yes, I know that things are tough, but we can be calm. Look at the miracle that has occurred! Even in the midst of all this turmoil.”

So, the carol’s lyrics are repudiation of the bleakness of the time.

When I first heard that story, I thought “Man, why did I never notice it before?” I didn’t have the song memorized, not past the first verse anyway. But when I looked them up, even then it doesn’t jump out at you. I’ve reproduced them below along with color-coding what can be a repudiation of the despair. Obviously, most of the song will have some theological significance, but other parts have clues:

Silent night, holy night, All is calm, all is bright Round yon virgin mother and child. Holy infant, so tender and mild, Sleep in heavenly peace, Sleep in heavenly peace.